by Norman Lewis
CHAPTER 14
Nam Hkam Bazaar
NAM HKAM in the white, dusty haze of the afternoon, was a less concentrated Mu-Sé, a sprawling collection of bamboo huts. The driver pulled out of the main street with its emptiness and aching light, and found the Amat’s compound. There he put me down, shook hands and departed, refusing to accept a fare. Almost collapsing as my legs touched the ground, I waited a moment for circulation and strength to return before picking up the iron bar provided and striking the gong suspended by the gateway. Apart from the medieval grandiosity of this gesture there was nothing impressive about the circumstances of my arrival. The compound consisted of three sides of a square of mean huts, surrounded by a broken fence of the kind which sometimes encloses a suburban allotment. A wrecked two-pounder gun, with wheels askew, stood in the centre of this space. It was attended continually by a guard armed with a rifle. I was led in to the presence of a man with a mild, empty Kachin face, whom I felt instinctively to be a clerk. And a clerk he was. The Amat was away but, said the clerk, I could stay in his haw.
The haw proved to be the biggest of the huts. It was raised on piles, about five feet from the ground. I was installed in one of the two large bare rooms, which, when I arrived, was occupied by a circle of soldiers playing cards, and some children who were annoying them. The soldiers left, one by one, although the children returned later to watch me as I washed. Shortly afterwards four soldiers staggered in with a massive mahogany table and two chairs. When the table was put down, the bamboo floor sagged beneath it. The soldiers went away, and the clerk appeared in the doorway. He was carrying a bottle of shoum, or country spirit, as it is politely called by the Kachin bourgeoisie. This was not the ordinary market stuff, he assured me, but a bottle from the Amat’s reserve, of special potency and flavour. He was right. A judicious sip roughened the lip membranes before passing in a scorching trickle down the throat. It tasted like vodka. Before withdrawing, the clerk asked me at what time he should arrange breakfast for the morning, adding that there would be various curries to order. I asked what was the usual time, and he said about eight o’clock. In Mu-Sé it had been eleven-thirty. It seemed that in the nineteen miles I had run into a new breakfast-time zone.
There was no way of closing the door except by tying it, which would have been churlish. It sagged perpetually eighteen inches open, a circumstance which gave endless pleasure to the clerk’s children who lived in a kind of dependent hut, just across the bamboo landing outside. In this causeway they settled down, a sober, well-behaved group, to learn what they could of my way of life, absenting themselves only for an occasional bowl of rice. In the late afternoon a Kachin soldier arrived. He seemed to have been attached to me for some unknown duty, as he unstrapped a long, heavy-bladed dah, and propped it with an air of finality in a corner, before laying out his kit beneath it. To find out whether this incident involved supervision or control, I went out and ploughed through the dust down to the dismal main street, where, having discovered a Chinese eating-house, I employed my recently acquired knowledge to order a meal. I was waited on by the owner’s Burmese wife, who carried a baby in a shawl upon her back. A dog lay curled in a shallow depression scraped in the earth under each table, and a huddle of Tibetans, wrapped in their togas, slept in a corner. Later, as a mild yellowness seeped into the waning sunlight they awoke and tried gently to arouse the interest of the customers in their dried lizards and coloured stones. All the Tibetans, here, as elsewhere in Burma, carried these treasures in British army haversacks. The senior member of the party, who wore a purple beret-shaped hat of plaited and lacquered osier, was the possessor of a jar of black unguent which caused some excitement. This I gathered was an extract of the organs of several rare animals. The restaurant owner licked it with connoisseurship, and made an offer, which was smilingly rejected. Someone bought a piece of glass which looked like a ruby for eight annas, one of which the vendor immediately gave to a beggar who was sipping a cup of free tea. The wares were then rewrapped in their grimy rags and put back in the haversacks; after which the Tibetans settled down to sleep again.
Meanwhile the streets were astir in the cool of the evening and the eating-house was filling up. Customers lined up before the meat showcase where one of the proprietor’s virgin daughters, acting as sales-lady, was producing delicacies which passed from hand to hand, to be dangled and pinched, before being returned to their hooks. When a sale took place the sliver or collop was passed to another daughter whose headdress proclaimed her knowledge of the world, and, working with a pair of scissors, she snipped the purchase into fragments manageable with chopsticks. These she arranged in neat piles to await free space in one of her father’s frying pans. All this activity was abnormal and was due to the influx of visitors and merchants to the celebrated bazaar to be held next day. My arrival at Nam Hkam at just this moment was the only lucky piece of timing in all my travels in Burma. I had been warmly recommended in Rangoon to see the Nam Hkam bazaar, if at all possible; it was said to be one of the most important and colourful in the Far East, serving Western Yunnan as well as the Northern Shan States. Since it would be in full swing less than an hour after dawn, and I was tired, I went back to the haw as soon as it was dark. I found my bodyguard sitting at the table, looking into space; but when I got out the country spirit he soon cheered up.
* * *
I was up and about by seven, trying to prepare myself by a vigorous walk for the threatened ordeal of the breakfast table. Irregular, sporadic feeding and strange provender were beginning to take their toll, and I felt queasy at the thought of the ‘various curries’ the Amat’s clerk had promised for the first meal of the day. At this hour Nam Hkam benefited from a background of mountains, cloaked in a mist which separated hill from hill and range from range. On these grew towering clumps of bamboo, pale, feathery eruptions in a landscape of smoking precipices and ravines. Below this ethereal panorama the town’s profile seemed stunted and broken: this is a normal feature of provincial cities of the Far East and due to an ancient Mongolian prejudice – a racial memory perhaps of the nomadic tent – against the erection of buildings of more than one floor. Sumptuary laws, too, have operated against imposing architecture, except for religious ends. It was perhaps to be expected of the relatively democratic Mongolian order of society – democratic in that its rewards have always been attained in the main by merit and effort, rather than birth – that office and status when acquired should have been hedged about with so rigid a protocol. The position which a man had won was advertised by all the adjuncts of his existence, by the size and materials of his betel-box and spittoon, by his clothes, his animals, his house. It was all laid down. There was no question of living beyond one’s means to impress the neighbours. If you had no official position you lived in a single-roomed shack with a palm-thatch. When you became a headman you were allowed something more solid, with teak pillars supporting a log roof. Myozas, or governors, were privileged to shelter beneath a roof of two storeys. Only the Sawbwa could aspire to the glory of a spire, to go with his gold umbrella, his velvet sandals and his peacock. Nam Hkam, then, was flat and straggling, with a few liquor and opium stores, tailors’ establishments and inns, but very few shops to face the annihilating competition of the bazaar. There were a few small, uninteresting pagodas, one of which seemed to have been struck by a bomb. A heap of broken masonry in the courtyard contained several hundred Buddhas, some unusually well-carved and coloured, but although they seemed to have been abandoned there, I doubted the propriety of taking one away. By the wall a buffalo lay abandoned to die. Several sprightly crows were already pecking at the soft, accessible parts of the body; the anus, the nostrils and the lips. Occasionally a lid slid slowly back, disclosing a terrified eye, the head rolled sadly from side to side, and the crows hopped back. To have attempted to put the animal out of its misery in this consecrated spot, would have caused grave scandal, if not a riot.
* * *
Breakfast was all I had feared. It was prec
eded by a stiff aperitif of country spirit; then followed an inexorable succession of dishes, vegetable soup, red rice with spring onions, the promised curries, pickled vegetables, tea, poured from a great pot with a chain as handle – two cups at a time for each person. With forthright Kachin hospitality the Amat’s clerk ladled out my portions, perplexed and disappointed at the size of my appetite. Feeling that only a twenty-four hours’ fast could help, I staggered down the steps of the haw and made for the market. I could not have hoped for a more brilliant spectacle.
Beyond ranks of innumerable pack-animals, bullocks and ponies, tethered with the regimented discipline which characterises the parking of cars at a sporting event in the West, the scene might have been taken from a lavish stage production of ‘Prince Igor’. The first English administrator to reach Nam Hkam reported in 1889 that about six thousand people visited this market every five days, and this number had certainly not decreased. From Burma, I could identify various Shans, in their enormous hats; Kachins with their strings of coins and skirts woven in the colours and zigzag motifs of the Indians of Central America; Palaungs, and occasional Lishaws, who looked like untidy Cossacks in their belted tunics and shapeless trousers. But there were visitors from Yunnan who escaped identification; strapping maidens in voluminous white turbans; spirited groups which scattered and dispersed at the sight of a camera, flouncing away with flashing back-cast glances, and a swirl of long skirts, pigtails and sashes.
The Palaungs of Nam Hkam were particularly elegant in dashingly cut ankle-length coats of cotton-velvet panelled with light and dark blue and with purple inserts at the elbow. They wore made-up cylindrical turbans of dark blue material, from the back of which tumbled, in medieval European style, a veil or panel, reaching half way down the back. Jewellery was plain: a double or triple collar of silver beads. One patrician figure, who out-topped her neighbours’ average of four-feet-nine by at least three inches, wore a turban that had developed into a kind of busby, its upper edge decorated with a looped chain of beads to match her necklace. Beside this majestic ensemble most European folk-costumes would have looked trivial and doll-like. It appears from the reports of the first administrators that such finery was previously restricted to the use of certain clans: it has now spread as one beneficial result, at least, of the degeneration of tribal organisation. One can imagine the horror of the ladies of the senior clan, the Patorus – there was only a handful of them – when the whole of the female section of the Palaung nation took to wearing their exclusive model.
It is said that the Palaungs are the most peace-loving of the Burmese minorities. Peoples become in the first instance ‘warrior peoples’ by using up or outgrowing the resources of their habitat. As soon as the economic origin of their bellicosity is forgotten, it tends to be regarded as inherent martial virtue, to be secretly respected whether one approves of it or not. The Palaungs are an example of a people who through efficient adaptation to an environment do not need a regular fresh supply of lebensraum. They live in harmony with each other; crimes of violence are rare, and murder unknown. Clearly, they make bad soldiers and they were much despised as recruiting material in the British colonial army, whereas the turbulent and aggressive Kachins were the darlings of their British commanders and ‘proved themselves magnificently’ against the Turks in the 1914–18 war.
The Palaungs are terribly afflicted by goitre. I estimated that twenty-five per cent of the older women I saw were sufferers. Sometimes the head was no more than a promontory upon a mass of shapeless flesh, reaching as far as the breasts. One poor woman I saw had to go about supporting her goitre with her hands.
Like so many hill-peoples the Palaungs have a dislike of the plains which is strongly tinged with superstitious aversion, an attitude found in reverse among the plainsmen of the Far East, whose awe of heights causes them to locate their most sacred places on mountain tops.
* * *
The bazaar of Nam Hkam, where the first British administrator noticed that much Manchester cloth and haberdashery was sold, had not lost its enthusiasm for all the West had to offer. Local products included crudely carved and vilely coloured Burmese toys, bearing only a token resemblance to the owls and alligators they were supposed to represent, coarse pottery, exquisite Chinese crockery, stiff Mandalay silk used in the making of longyis, and artificial flowers. Indian influence showed itself in plastic models of the Taj Mahal. But two-thirds of the market space was allotted to the West – toothpastes, patent medicines, beauty products, cigarettes – even the well-known beverage claimed to possess extraordinary soporific qualities. There were tins of condensed milk too, valued as much for the container as the contents, empty tins having become a recognised Burmese measure. Thus two let-kut (the quantity which may be heaped upon the surface of two hands joined together) equals one condensed-milk tin – originally a Kônsa, or the amount of rice required by one person for a meal.
A demand had been produced for all these products by advertising in the Rangoon press; and the Rangoon agents would ship a proportion of what they received out to such markets as Nam Hkam, assuming that whatever the nature of the goods, their place of origin would sell them. Sometimes it was clear that the purpose of the product was not understood. A cheroot-seller, for instance, would on request, smear a little Vick Vapour-rub on the mouthpiece of a cheroot, before handing it to his customer.
There is no doubt that the East – such of it as remains open to occidental enterprise – is a certain and inexhaustible market for all that can be sent there. When one sees what Orientals can be induced to buy it is hard to believe that the East India Company had trouble in disposing of its broadcloths. Above all, the exporter cannot go wrong with patent medicines, to which people who have been brought up in an atmosphere of horoscopes and alchemy, surrender themselves naturally. All that is necessary is to find some way, by loans to be used in establishing industries or by the gift of agricultural machinery, of increasing purchasing power. The consumption of branded laxatives, stomach powders and cough cures would then be colossal. At the present time a Palaung has to put in a week’s labour in his opium field before he can buy a packet of aspirins, or a fortnight before a tube of halitosis-averting toothpaste comes within his reach. If only science could find some way of increasing his production he might eventually become a consumer of shirts with non-shrinkable collars, ballpoint pens, and electric shavers.
In the meantime the hill peoples will go on doing what they can to combat by the traditional methods the ninety-six diseases recognised by orthodox Burmans. These methods are most comprehensive, and include dosing with the remedies – most of them fearsome – contained in a vast materia medica, with arsenic, soot and excrement, and with the scrapings of meteoric stones. They include treatment by the exhibition of pictures of peacocks and hares, by semi-strangling, by probing with gold and silver needles, by beating with rods incised with cabalistic figures, by burning and scalding, by inhalation of perfumes and fetid stenches, by the playing of music, martial, strident or sympathetic, by the laying on of hands, the muttering of spells and prayer. Some of these methods have received belated praise from Western doctors, particularly that of acupuncture, which, dignified by a medico-scientific jargon, has something of a current vogue in France.
The contribution of the Shans to the science of healing is therapeutic shampooing. This is a form of massage, applied chiefly to the head, and here in Nam Hkam, between the tooth-pullers, a specialist was at work upon his victim, who writhed and groaned slightly under the manipulations of the iron fingers, while other patients, stripped to the waist, squatted in uneasy silence awaiting their turn. Shampooing, like all the other treatments, if given with proper regard to the patient’s horoscope, is regarded as a panacea, except in the case of venereal ailments, which are thought to be of supernatural origin and produced by the nocturnal bites of nats. It is all very funny, in a way, and yet many Europeans living in these remote parts of the world go secretly for treatment to such practitioners, excusing themselve
s, if discovered, by saying that at least it can do no harm. When we remember the renowned and highly gifted English authoress who in recent years tried to arrest her fatal malady by inhaling the breath of cows, we realise that in medical matters, the more extravagant the treatment, the greater its appeal, even to the most intelligent of us.
* * *
Like all fairs, the bazaar of Nam Hkam had something special to offer in the way of holiday diet. This consisted of thin, buckled cakes, like large chapatis. Something similar in composition was produced in fancy shapes by squeezing maize-flour paste through machines into vats of boiling oil. Cooks were producing by a kind of legerdemain vast, swelling, edible creations, which developed on immersion in the boiling fat from the most insignificant beginnings of paste. Plunging a few thin white strings into the liquid they would slowly withdraw portentous, inflated shapes, which finally resembled the bare ribs of a mighty ox-carcass. The Palaungs, having sold their country spirit and their opium, bought great quantities of those unsubstantial fairings, departing to their eyries with panniers stuffed and ponies piled with fragile mountains of the Shan version of potato-crisps.
